On Visual Literacy: Genderscapes in the Daily Press of Bengali India

Abstract

Visual literacy refers to the ability to “read” images, much like the way we “read” language. This form of literacy requires an awareness of the ways that visual images communicate meanings. Visual rhetoric does not only include specific concepts of design or aesthetic codes; it also describes how images reflect, communicate, and shape meanings. The evidence presented here to illustrate the issues around the manipulation, “reading” and interpretation of the imagery is drawn from the author’s larger research on the interplays between mass-mediatized images in the state of West Bengal, India, and the ideological discourses associated to the constitution/reproduction of the dominant Bengali culture and the politics of alterity and gender.